


Like Water Circling A Drain

by rinwins



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood, Gen, Mild D/s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 14:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rinwins/pseuds/rinwins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's never taken a life. This might be easier if she had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Water Circling A Drain

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Graveyard Smash ficathon on LJ.  
> Prompt: Elementary, Joan[/]Sherlock, _they're not solving crimes, they're committing them_

She’s never taken a life.  
  
This might be easier if she had.  
  
Maybe if she had gone for a regular soldier, instead of an unsuccessful Army doctor. Maybe if she could say (or the newspapers could say about her, when they found out, if they ever found out) that she’d snapped, that she’d decided if she couldn’t save lives she was going to destroy them. That would be simple. Probably too simple. Certainly too simple for anything that involves Sherlock Holmes.  
  
She’s never taken a life, not on purpose, anyway. But she’s getting closer and closer to it, like water circling a drain.  
  
It’s not always murder, of course, it’d be far too easy to trace if it was. Even she didn’t find out for a while, not until after she’d started to go along on the heists and forgeries and extortions, not until she’d started to have  _fun_.  
  
Not until the first time he came home with blood still on his face and hands. And she cleaned him up, because she’s Joan Watson and he’s Sherlock Holmes and this is how they work. The blood washed off red into the sink, circling the drain, closer and closer.  
  
It didn’t occur to her until much later, as she tried to fall asleep with the sounds of Sherlock’s far-too-regular breathing from the next room, that she could have called the police.   
  
So this is how they work now. They create their crimes, and sometimes they help Gregson solve them afterwards, pinning the blame on someone who probably deserves it. And every so often (on special occasions, Sherlock says, even if he doesn’t always tell her what they are, and she never asks) he goes out alone and she stays up waiting.   
  
And he comes home, at three, four, five in the morning sometimes, and she sits him down in the bathroom, and “Hands,” she says, and he gives her his hands to clean with the black washcloth that doesn’t show stains. (There’s usually not much, except for the time he decided to leave some cryptic German fingerpainting for the police to chase.) And then she has him strip his shirt off, inspects his arms, his chest, and he smiles at her while she washes the blood from his face. And she says “All clean,” and stands him up again, and they douse everything in peroxide and turn the cold water on and he holds her while they watch the red bleed out into the sink. And she never so much as thinks about calling the police again, because you can’t put blood back into a body and you can’t pull water back up the drain.  
  
She’s never taken a life, except for maybe her own.


End file.
